But beyond the simple movements—or table-turning—and the intelligible responses—or table-tilting—both of which are at least primâ facie physically explicable by the sitters' unconscious pressure, without postulating any unknown physical force at all,—it is alleged by many persons that further physical phenomena occur; namely, that the table moves in a direction, or with a violence, which no unconscious pressure can explain; and also that percussive sounds or "raps" occur, which no unconscious action, or indeed no agency known to us, could produce. These raps communicate messages like the tilts, and it is to them that the name of "spirit-rapping" is properly given. But spiritualists generally draw little distinction between these four phenomena—mere table-turning, responsive table-tilting, movements of inexplicable vehemence, and responsive raps—attributing all alike to the agency of departed spirits of men and women, or at any rate to disembodied intelligences of some kind or other.
I am not at present discussing the physical phenomena of Spiritualism, and I shall therefore leave on one side all the alleged movements and noises of this kind for which unconscious pressure will not account. I do not prejudge the question as to their real occurrence; but assuming that such disturbances of the physical order do occur, there is at least no primâ facie need to refer them to disembodied spirits. If a table moves when no one is touching it; this is not obviously more likely to have been effected by my deceased grandfather than by myself. We cannot tell how I could move it; but then we cannot tell how he could move it either. The question must be argued on its merits in each case; and our present argument is not therefore vitiated by our postponement of this further problem.
M. Richet[164] was, I believe, the first writer, outside the Spiritualistic group, who so much as showed any practical knowledge of this phenomenon, still less endeavoured to explain it. Faraday's well-known explanation of table-turning as the result of the summation of many unconscious movements—obviously true as it is for some of the simplest cases of table-movement—does not touch this far more difficult question of the origination of these intelligent messages, conveyed by distinct and repeated movements of some object admitting of ready displacement. The ordinary explanation—I am speaking, of course, of cases where fraud is not in question—is that the sitter unconsciously sets going and stops the movements so as to shape the word in accordance with his expectation. Now that he unconsciously sets going and stops the movements is part of my own present contention, but that the word is thereby shaped in accordance with his expectation is often far indeed from being the case. To those indeed who are familiar with automatic written messages, this question as to the unexpectedness of the tilted messages will present itself in a new light. If the written messages originate in a source beyond the automatist's supraliminal self, so too may the tilted messages;—even though we admit that the tilts are caused by his hand's pressure of the table just as directly as the script by his hand's manipulation of the pen.
One piece of evidence showing that written messages are not always the mere echo of expectation is a case[165] where anagrams were automatically written, which their writer was not at once able to decipher. Following this hint, I have occasionally succeeded in getting anagrams tilted out for myself by movements of a small table which I alone touched.
This is a kind of experiment which might with advantage be oftener repeated; for the extreme incoherence and silliness of the responses thus obtained does not prevent the process itself from being in a high degree instructive. Here, again (as in automatic writing), a man may hold colloquy with his own dream—may note in actual juxtaposition two separate strata of his own intelligence.
I shall not at present pursue the discussion of these tilted responses beyond this their very lowest and most rudimentary stage. They almost immediately suggest another problem, for which our discussion is hardly ripe, the participation, namely, of several minds in the production of the same automatic message. There is something of this difficulty even in the explanation of messages given when the hands of two persons are touching a planchette; but when the instrument of response is large, and the method of response simple, as with table-tilting, we find this question of the influence of more minds than one imperatively recurring.
Our immediate object, however, is rather to correlate the different attainable modes of automatic response in some intelligible scheme than to pursue any one of them through all its phases. We regarded the table-tilting process as in one sense the simplest, the least differentiated form of motor response. It is a kind of gesture merely, though a gesture implying knowledge of the alphabet. Let us see in what directions the movement of response becomes more specialised,—as gesture parts into pictorial art and articulate speech. We find, in fact, that a just similar divergence of impulses takes place in automatic response. On the one hand the motor impulse specialises itself into drawing; on the other hand it specialises itself into speech. Of automatic drawing I have already said something (Chapter III.). Automatic speech will receive detailed treatment in Chapter IX. At present I shall only briefly indicate the position of each form of movement among cognate automatisms.
Some of my readers may have seen these so-called "spirit-drawings,"—designs, sometimes in colour, whose author asserts that he drew them without any plan, or even knowledge of what his hand was going to do. This assertion may be quite true, and the person making it may be perfectly sane.[166] The drawings so made will be found curiously accordant with what the view which I am explaining would lead us to expect. For they exhibit a fusion of arabesque with ideography; that is to say, they partly resemble the forms of ornamentation into which the artistic hand strays when, as it were, dreaming on the paper without definite plan; and partly they afford a parallel to the early attempts at symbolic self-expression of savages who have not yet learnt an alphabet. Like savage writing, they pass by insensible transitions from direct pictorial symbolism to an abbreviated ideography, mingled in its turn with writing of a fantastic or of an ordinary kind.
And here, before we enter on the study of automatic writing, I must refer to two great historic cases of automatism, which may serve as a kind of prologue to what is to follow. One case, that of Socrates, is a case of monitory inhibition; the other, that of Jeanne d'Arc, of monitory impulse.
The Founder of Science himself—the permanent type of sanity, shrewdness, physical robustness, and moral balance—was guided in all the affairs of life by a monitory Voice,—by "the Dæmon of Socrates." This is a case which can never lose its interest, a case which has been vouched for by the most practical, and discussed by the loftiest intellect of Greece,—both of them intimate friends of the illustrious subject;—a case, therefore, which one who endeavours to throw new light on hallucination and automatism is bound, even at this distance of time, to endeavour to explain.[167] And this is the more needful, since a treatise was actually written, a generation ago, as "a specimen of the application of the science of psychology to the science of history," arguing from the records of the δαιμὁνιον in Xenophon and Plato that Socrates was in fact insane.[168]